Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther

Samuel Ajayi was sold into slavery as a young teenager, but is remembered most for his work as a missionary, his role as the first African Anglican Bishop in Nigeria and his phenominel work as a linguist. It was arguably a stroke of good fortune that saw the Portugese ship that he was on captured by the British and diverted to Freetown in Sierra Leone where he converted to christianty and became a missionary with the Anglican Church Missionary Society. He was also one of the first students of the Fourah Bay college which was founded in 1928. He learnt to speak several languages including English, Latin, Greek ,Temne, Igbo and Hausa. He wrote many books and was responsible for the huge task of translating the bible into Yoruba, a Yoruba book of prayer and a Yoruba dictionary. He visited England on more than one occasion and was very eloquent and influential. He spoke with politicians as well as the Queen and did much for christiantity and Abeokuta where he was involved in setting up the Christian Missionary Society ( CMS ) in 1843. His skills as an interpreter played a major role in facilitating communication and converting the local people to christianity during the the Niger expeditions of 1854 and 1857. In 1864 he was ordained as a bishop and received his doctorate of Divinity from Oxford University.

He died following a stroke in 1891 aged 84.